Is Consciousness Curative?

It may be just as well at this point to discuss explicitly an assumption that is everywhere implicit in psychoanalytic thinking, to wit, the curative nature of consciousness. I am not aware of the existence in the whole wide range of analytic literature of the asking and the answering of the explicit question: Why should consciousness be curative?

At first glance at the history of thought we are justified in believing quite the reverse in fact: that consciousness is a pain, a travail, a burden, a malady. Thinking as critical analysis, as reflection, as concentrated probing of memories and behaviors and experiences, is a task so difficult as to be quite beyond the capacity of commonplace minds, an enterprise full of peril even for the most audacious minds. The tragedy of thought expresses almost perfectly what thinking comes to when pursued as relentless reflection. The history of philosophy is the history of pessimism (often disguising itself as absolute idealism or even as crudest materialism). The malady of thought is a phenomenon well known to those minds capable of thinking sincerely.

If it be reasonably true that thinking, as contradistinguished from day—dreaming and self—indulgent reverie and mystic imagining and infantile wish—fulfilment, is a comparatively late development in the evolution of life, we ought to be on our guard against any easy assumption of thinking's magic efficacy as a therapeutic agency. Thinking is not “natural” to man in the simple sense that he loves to think as he spontaneously enjoys eating, drinking, sexing, showing off. Measured by philosophic criterion, man is anything but a thinking animal. The fierce compulsive driving power of instinct has ruled his life from the beginning like a force beyond his control. Habit is in fact a sort of second nature to him. Impulse eternally threatens the foundations of his human universe. Out of the maddening chaos of his badly controlled existence he seeks with a kind of desperate futility to constr